Exquisite Corpse 2.0: Qualitative analysis of a community-based fiction project

Abstract

This paper describes the outcome of a public art project exploring collaborative, community-based authorship of a work of fiction with contributions transmitted over the Twitter social network. Between July 15 th, 2011 and July 17th, 71 authors, 8 invited and the rest voluntary members of the community, collaborated over Twitter, tweeting a "novel" 140 characters at a time. Dubbed "Novel Iowa City," the project was displayed to the public during the Iowa City Book Festival attended by thousands. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the product of this process, reflecting on the challenges community-based authorship imposes on the writing of fiction and suggests best practices for future collaborative fiction projects. © 2012 ACM.